The gesture control system means a system, by means of which the managing of a application, observable with senses, takes place at least partly by hand motions. The control system comprises motion sensors, which move along with the hand of a person using the application, and the converters and processing programs for the signals generated by the motion sensors. The hand motions, or gestures, then are recognized on grounds of e.g. accelerations occurring in the motions. The application controlled by gestures can be for example a game loaded into a mobile terminal or the controlling program of an external electromechanical device. The “application” means in this description and the claims both an observable process and a program, which directly realizes said process.
Recognizing a motion by equipments, as such, is known from before. Recognition systems applying acceleration sensors are disclosed among other documents in the articles “Recognizing Human Motion with Multiple Acceleration Sensors” (Mäntyjärvi & kumpp., IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 2001) and “Recognizing Movements of a Portable Handheld Device Using Symbolic Representation and Coding of Sensor Signals” (Flanagan et al., International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, 2002) and in the publication WO 03/001340. The system in accordance with the last-mentioned publication includes also a gesture library and a program analyzing acceleration data and defining, if that data corresponds to a certain three-dimensional gesture.
Also the controlling of an application by hand motions is known from before. For example the publication WO 00/63874 discloses a system, in which an application changes the shape of a pattern seen in the computer display and moves the pattern, depending on how a control device, to be held in the hand, is handled. The control device comprises acceleration sensors for three dimensions and a button with a pressure sensor.
FIG. 1 presents a simplified diagram showing the interfacing an application to its control system, according to the prior art. The whole system comprises a hardware portion HW and a software portion SW. Regarding the hardware portion there is drawn in FIG. 1 a sensor unit SU, an interface IF of the sensor unit, a memory MEM and a computer bus. The software portion comprises a driver 140 for the interface IF, a processing software 130 for the signals which correspond to the hand motions, an application 110 controllable by the hand motions and an operation system OS of the computer at issue. The driver 140 stores the gesture signals, converted to digital form by the interface IF, to the memory MEM. The signal processing software then analyzes the gesture signals and provides a control to the application. Naturally, the signal processing software has to be matched to the application for the data transfer between them.
A flaw in the control systems like the above-mentioned systems is the limited scope of their use: Changing an application to another application presumes amending work in the software of the control system. Likewise transferring the system to another computer of other type requires matching work in the programs.